Word: starke
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Mary Wigman did her stark, muscular, barefoot dances before U.S. audiences in the early '30s, some of the irreverent wrote the exhibition off as prancing, lunging and posturing. But critics wrote respectfully of "a personal and spiritual force, concentrated, emanated, outflung." After 1933, like many another German artist, she was seldom seen and little noted by the rest of the world. Last week Mary Wigman, past 60 and vibrant as ever, turned up in Berlin to reopen her once-famed modern dance school...
...narrator is Jack Burden, a newspaperman and an angry fellow full of the sardonic lingo of the pressroom. The story he unreels with a series of flashbacks and asides is the story of Willie Stark, a poor farmer's awkward, hulking son from Mason City. Willie got his political start at home as county treasurer. He was honest, and that was why a Democratic faction in the state picked him up in the backwoods in 1926 and ran him in the primary for governor...
...Party, just Willie. This discovery in the end caused woe to many men. For there was a power in Willie Stark, the country lawyer. Reporter Burden, who had covered his phony campaign and seen him broken open by it, saw him again four years later after the primary in 1930. "But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the wall...
Then Jack Burden became a sort of confidential agent to Governor Willie Stark, who gave him research jobs on actual or potential enemies. Jack rode around in the Boss's Cadillac, chauffeured by Sugar-Boy, the little gunman. The Boss built the roads and the schools he had promised to his fellow hicks; he taxed the rich to pay for them. The Boss had to do other things to get and keep what he wanted. Burden got a long lesson in power and what happens to people who have...
Jack Burden did a thoroughly successful job on Judge Irwin but he did not explode the charge until Stark's son, Tom, got a girl into trouble and political enemies started to use this against Willie. When the charge did go off, it uncovered some strange relationships (and some unnecessary melodrama). Jack's mother and his friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, and a lot of others are drawn into the vortex of events that is the swift and punishing, tragic and surprising last half of this book. It is climaxed by the inevitable assassination of Willie Stark...